According to The Asahi Shimbun today, Kuraray Co., creator of the world’s first artificial leather for shoes, is pitching its product to top luxury brands in Europe.
After repeatedly making prototypes and visiting potential buyers of its Clarino artificial leather, the company finally formed a partnership this year with Italian tanners.
Its new variation of Clarino, long known as a material for standard school backpacks in Japan, now has the feel, texture and other properties of genuine leather.
“Professionals mistook it for natural leather” at a trade show in Milan in September, according to company officials.
Kuraray is seeking to expand by the use of its artificial leather in such goods as luxury handbags and jackets as the company marks the 50th anniversary of Clarino’s release in 1965.
“We want to do our best to reach 100 years,” Kuraray President Masaaki Ito said at an unveiling ceremony of the new Clarino in Japan.
Kuraray says the improved Clarino is a next-generation material that maintains the advantages of artificial leather, such as a light weight and water resistance. Through a collaboration with an Italian tanning business, Kuraray has developed a method to give a natural finish for the artificial leather.
Using a production method developed in 2009, Kuraray doubled the density of the material’s composition and used collagen fibers to make it resemble natural leather.
Kuraray originally developed Clarino for shoes and started using the material for school bags in 1970. But revenue from the products account for only about 10 percent of its sales today.

According to The Nikkei Asian Review, Japan's health ministry approved on Wednesday sale of a wearable walk-assist robot for use in medical facilities, underscoring the government's push to promote such products as part of growth strategy.
The HAL for Medical Use, lower limb type, from startup Cyberdyne is the first wearable medical robot approved for sale in Japan.
The product is designed for use in healthcare facilities by patients with eight incurable conditions including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), muscular dystrophy, spinal muscular atrophy, and spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, given height and weight requirements.
Cyberdyne originated at the University of Tsukuba. Yoshiyuki Sankai, a professor there, developed the technology and heads the company as president.
Sensors attached to the thigh and other parts of the body detect the weak signals from nervous system, and the motor-powered limbs facilitate the movement of the patient's joints by leading them in the desired direction. This helps the body remember how to walk, according to the company.
The robot could delay the progress of a disorder, or help regain leg function.
Clinical trials at a national hospital in Niigata Prefecture and elsewhere showed that 24 patients who underwent nine sessions of exercises over a three-month period could walk greater distances than those who did not undergo such exercises.
"We hope to introduce it initially to eight hospitals including the Niigata hospital," Sankai said. If the treatment qualifies for insurance coverage, the company will work to expand the application to spinal cord conditions, too.
The robot is already approved in Europe. In Germany, one session of 60-90 minutes costs 500 euros (US$530). Coverage by public health insurance is currently being pursued. But work-related injury insurance fully covers 60 sessions. The bulk of cases are for spinal cord injuries.
Other medical robots, such as the endoscopic-surgery assist system da Vinci, have been on the market, too. But a wearable one is rare. The Japanese health ministry likely was driven by a sense of urgency to do everything in its power to combat incurable diseases and age-related conditions in a graying society.
Cyberdyne filed with the health ministry in March, aiming to get approval in nine months under an expedited screening process available for medical equipment to treat rare diseases. The actual process took only eight months, highlighting the government's eagerness to promote such products as part of growth strategy. "There is the feel that big reforms are underway to create a new medical industry," Sankai said.

According to The Australian Financial Review today, Qantas has unveiled plans to target 2 to 3 per cent of the $19 billion Australian private health insurance market by introducing a new product, Qantas Assure, in partnership with health insurance nib, that will reward members with frequent flyer points for being more active.
Qantas Assure will allow members to earn frequent flyer points not just for paying their bills but also for meeting targets through a wellness app that syncs with mobile phones and popular forms of wearables, such as Apple Watches and Fitbits, when the policy launches in the first half of next year. The apps will log the number of steps taken in a day and then deposit Qantas frequent flyer points in member accounts.
Qantas said there are estimates around one-quarter of Australians now own a fitness tracker but fewer than one in five Australians took the recommended 10,000 steps per day.
Members will be able to choose from a variety of daily or weekly targets depending on their lifestyles, with the number of frequent flyer points earned increasing with the size of the target.
"We think it will be one of the highest ways of earning frequent flyer points in total," Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said.
Under the deal, Qantas Loyalty will provide its marketing, data and customer retention expertise while nib will provide health insurance, risk assessment and underwriting capability.
The deal will involve the pair sharing equally the gross profitability of the health insurance plans. This is unlike typical Qantas frequent flyer partnerships under which the airline simply sells points to credit card issuers and retailers.
Qantas and nib will target a 2 to 3 per cent share of the private health insurance market on a revenue basis in the first five years, equating to as much as $570 million of annual revenue based on current market size of $19 billion.

According to The Nikkei Asian Review today, Toyota Motor plans to make its new C-HR compact sport utility vehicle a key global model, aiming to shore up a weak link in its line-up as small SUVs grow more popular.
Toyota produces and sells such cars as the Corolla compact, the Camry midsize sedan and the RAV4 SUV worldwide. While the Corolla is popular throughout the world, Camry and RAV4 sales centre on the U.S. The Japanese automaker will position Europe and China as key markets for the compact SUVs its line-up had lacked, aiming to shore up its market share.
Production is slated to begin in the fall of 2016 in Turkey and Japan's Miyagi Prefecture, then expand in 2018 to Thailand and China's Tianjin and Guangzhou. Annual capacity is expected to reach roughly 300,000 vehicles. Toyota will make about 10,000 C-HRs a month in Turkey and China, 5,000 in Japan and around 2,000 in Thailand.
The automaker will switch existing lines over to C-HR production rather than expand overall capacity. It is expected to spend tens of billions of yen on dies and other necessary equipment.
As part of its manufacturing reforms, the automaker has adopted the Toyota New Global Architecture design initiative, which entails such measures as standardizing parts across multiple models. The C-HR will likely be the first new model based on this framework. It will share a platform and other key parts with the revamped Prius to go on sale in December.
Toyota will supply the European market from the plant in Turkey. In Japan, the vehicle will be positioned as the effective successor to the RAV4. While low oil prices have fueled brisk sales of big SUVs in the U.S., Toyota sees some demand for smaller SUVs as well. It will sell the C-HR under the Scion brand aimed at younger consumers.
Toyota plans to offer a model with a turbo gasoline engine as well as a hybrid model. It aims to use the latter -- as well as a hybrid version of the Vitz compact, a Japanese mainstay -- to help it achieve its goal of selling 1.5 million hybrids a year by 2020. Its hybrid sales in 2014 totaled 1.26 million vehicles.
A U.S. research firm expects global SUV sales to outpace sedan sales and account for one-fourth of vehicle demand by 2020. Smaller SUVs, which are more affordable and suited to driving on city streets, are especially popular in Europe.

According to The Australian Financial Review today, the smaller housing boom in Melbourne has led to the capital city preserving its values better than Sydney, which is headed for a definite cooling.
While preliminary auction rates for Melbourne fell to 64.7 per cent, there were more properties cleared in Melbourne than Sydney, according to Corelogic RP Data.
Sydney's preliminary rate was 59.3 per cent, the third week in a row the city has recorded below 60 per cent and the lowest since February 2013.
"The boom has not been as prevalent in Melbourne, that's why the market is holding," property analyst SQM Research's Louis Christopher said.
"We strongly believe Melbourne will outperform in 2016 … while the slowdown in Sydney is definitely accelerating."
Mr Christopher who correctly predicted the size of the recent boom had predicted the Melbourne market will continue to rise to double digit growth in 2016 but Sydney will maintain in a 4 to 9 per cent range.
"For Sydney, the high 50s is still very good," Ray White NSW chief auctioneer, Scott Smith said.
Mr Smith said the Sydney market is doing what it has always done: its eastern suburbs, northern beaches, lower north shore and inner-west areas performing strongly.
Clearance rates in Brisbane improved from last week to 43.6 per cent, similar to the same time last year. Auction volumes were also higher.

According to The Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo will pour millions of dollars into a U.S. company to pave the way for the introduction of Shinkansen bullet train technology in the United States.
The investment, planned by a Japanese government-affiliated fund, is seen as a key step in plans for bullet trains to be whizzing through the countryside of Texas.
Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) is planning to export trains based on the N700 series that runs on the Tokaido Shinkansen Line.
The technology would be used to build a high-speed rail system connecting the Texas cities of Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, which lie about 400 kilometers apart.
The high-speed trains would cover the distance in roughly 90 minutes.
Because of the huge price tag that comes with constructing the railway line and purchasing the rail cars, the Japan Overseas Infrastructure Investment Corporation for Transport and Urban Development (JOIN) intends to invest between $30 million and US $40 million (3.7 billion yen and 4.9 billion yen) in Texas Central Partners (TCP), a company that is in charge of the project.
JOIN was established by the government in 2014 to support the export of infrastructure projects, a key pillar of the "Abenomics" policies to strengthen Japan's economy.
An environmental impact assessment of the project will be completed by the U.S. Transportation Department in 2016, and construction would then likely start the following year.
Officials of JOIN visited the United States in November and are now ironing out the final details of the investment plan.
TCP collected about US$75 million in investments from local real estate developers and other companies in July. It plans to use the investment from JOIN and other partners to design tunnels and bridges along the high-speed rail line as well as formulate a detailed construction plan.
The biggest hurdle is the overall cost of the project, which is estimated at more than US$12 billion (about 1.5 trillion yen).
The outlay by JOIN could lead to more investors, both in the United States and elsewhere, taking part in the project, such as the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, which is considering it.

According to The Asahi Shimbun today, Japan has been exporting the results of one of its most advanced technologies for free, giving dozens of countries information that could save millions of lives.
The Japan Meteorological Agency’s numerical weather prediction technology is now used in more than 40 countries, mainly in Asia, where increasing instances of abnormal weather phenomena are posing threats to farming industries and communities.
The JMA on 17 Nov opened its eighth training session on how to use the huge volumes of observation data collected from around the world. The agency uses supercomputers to process the information for simulations of future weather conditions at certain locations.
Weather forecasters from 14 countries and one region in Asia including Pakistan and Myanmar, joined this year’s training session ends on 20 Nov.
In predicting weather patterns one month in advance, JMA meteorologists offered such advice as first finding data showing signs that low- and high-atmospheric pressure systems are developing.
“I hope we can utilize highly accurate forecasts like Japan’s for agriculture,” said Le Ha, a participant from the National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting in Vietnam.
The JMA uses software to analyse the data to predict changes in pressure and the movements of the front. Countries receive the data from a 20-kilometer-square-grid model to make various types of weather forecasts, such as one-month predictions.
Accuracy depends on the amount of observation data available and the capacity of a supercomputer. Japan is now competing with the United States and Britain, which are also providing data to various countries.
The JMA started providing data to overseas countries around 2007.
Designated as a regional climate centre by the World Meteorological Organization in 2009, the JMA has been playing a leadership role for Asian climate services.
The seminars and workshops for Asian weather forecasters are part of the effort.
The data are also provided to Kenya, Libya and Fiji.
“If the Japanese model is used around the world, it will increase our chances of correcting defects, which will eventually improve the accuracy of forecasting on the part of Japan,” said Kazutoshi Onogi, director of the JMA’s Tokyo Climate Centre.

According to The Australian Financial Review today, Australian investors have begun buying in to the rise of the machines, as a company promising to replace the humble brickie with a robot that can build a four-bedroom house in two days hit the ASX boards.
Fastbrick Robotics started trading on the ASX on Wednesday, and was up almost 4 per cent by midday.
It backdoor listed through DMY Capital and in a sign of investor demand for robotic automation, it raised $5.75 million, substantially more than its $3 million target, in an oversubscribed prospectus capital raising.
The capital will be used to fund the construction of the company's Hadrian 109 robots for commercial use, with the first robots expected to be rolled out in Western Australia in 2017.
Fastbrick Robotics chief executive Mike Pivac said the robots would be able to build a house faster and more accurately than traditional methods.
"The home buyer is the real beneficiary of this. The time it takes to build a standard home is six to eight weeks, so the home buyer will save $20,000 to $30,000," he said.
"We've had commercial interest from 45 countries. The UK and Europe are strong market places for us at the moment. There are skill shortages there which have put upward pressure on house pricing and brick suppliers are very keen for automated systems to transition into the industry over the next few years."
While the robots will put some bricklayers out of a job, Mr Pivac said the idea was to have them work alongside the robots, and to fill the skill shortage in the industry.

According to The Nikkei Asian Review, Japan's Yamato Holdings looks to tap demand for rapid parcel shipping to Asia with a new logistics centre in Okinawa Prefecture, courting business-to-business service as competition heats up in the home delivery market.
The new facility in Naha began operations on Wednesday. Dubbed "Southern Gate," it accepts high-value-added packages from business clients for express shipment to sites around Asia.
"We hope to create new value for our clients with the site's next-day delivery access to major cities in Asia," Chairman Makoto Kigawa said at the opening ceremony on Tuesday.
The Southern Gate facility occupies warehouse space rented from the prefectural government near Naha Airport, which permits late-night air traffic and runs customs services around the clock.
The new center contains 26,590 sq. meters of total floor space, nine times the size of a nearby building Yamato has rented since 2013. The company will retain the smaller space, anticipating stronger international shipping demand when the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact takes effect.
Yamato already offers express home delivery and other services to Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. Companies increasingly are using those offerings for business-to-business shipping. A major electronics manufacturer, for example, has contracted with Yamato since summer 2013 to store and ship components for cash-sorting devices. The shipper manages 4,200 different replacement parts at its Okinawa site -- within four hours of major Asian cities by air -- and delivers them as needed.
That system is now the model for Yamato's business-oriented service. Health and beauty company Sunstar, cosmetics maker Hoshi and others will set up shop in Yamato's new building. The companies see the site as a center for Asian exports as well as distribution within Japan. Yamato looks to transform itself "from a domestic home delivery company to one that lets businesses expand logistics to Asia," Kigawa said.
Yamato has good reason to shift focus to business-oriented shipping: Its core home delivery operations have suffered lately, even as demand grows. Group operating profit sank 15% year over year to 18 billion yen (US$145 million) for the April-September half. Yamato's Ta-Q-Bin service handled 821 million parcels in the half, up 4% from the year-earlier period, but the average rate per package fell by more than 1% to around 585 yen.
"A larger percentage of shipments came from high-volume main-order businesses," said Managing Executive Officer Kenichi Shibasaki. These companies, including Amazon Japan, drive hard bargains during price negotiations.
Yamato also faces a larger threat from Japan Post Co., whose share of the home delivery market rose 1.7 percentage points to 13.6% in fiscal 2014. Yamato Transport, the largest player with a share of over 40%, saw volume drop as a result of rate hikes.
Japan Post's postal and domestic logistics business booked a 46.3 billion yen operating loss for April-September 2015. A Yamato executive complained that the government-held company "is slashing prices to draw in orders without any regard to profitability, even as Tokyo mounts efforts to escape deflation."
Second-place shipper Sagawa Express, with a market share around 30%, offers a different model. Parent company SG Holdings' group operating profit surged 41% to 28.3 billion yen for the first half. Business-to-business shipping accounts for roughly two-thirds of the company's operations, compared with Yamato's 50%. Yamato is thus more exposed to competition from Japan Post in home parcel deliveries, including direct-to-consumer shipping services.
Yamato is overhauling its distribution network, funding Southern Gate and other projects including the 140 billion-yen Tokyo-area Haneda Chronogate centre, one of the largest logistics facilities in Japan. The reorganization is intended in part to make stronger business-oriented shipping a Yamato mainstay. Enlarging the network also will permit expanded same-day home delivery service for online shopping and other purchases.
Nippon Express and Hitachi Transport System, along with Sagawa, have built strong operations for business-oriented shipping among high-volume clients. U.S. companies including United Parcel Service and FedEx, meanwhile, have a secure lead in international parcel shipping. Yamato "will create new demand for package and parcel service to Asia," Kigawa said. But "we're only 20-30% of the way there," he conceded.
Yamato has built a reputation for innovation, and breaking out of its lull will depend on the company's ability to leverage that legacy as it turns toward the business-to-business market.

According to The Australian Financial Review today, BG Group and its Asian partners in the $US20.4 billion Queensland Curtis LNG venture have given the go-ahead for a further $1.7 billion of investment to drill up to 400 more wells to maintain gas supply, providing a welcome lift to resources industry spending.
Drilling for the Charlie project will take place during the next two years in permits west of Wandoan in the Surat basin, with Leighton Contractors winning the main contract to carry out the work, which will create up to 1600 jobs.
The large investment underscores the ongoing spending commitment required by Queensland coal seam gas-based LNG projects, which need to keep drilling new wells every year to maintain gas supplies for their export plants in Gladstone. BG started shipments from its QCLNG venture in January, marking the first gas exports from Queensland, and has so far delivered 62 cargoes to Asia.
It also shows that British-based BG has not deviated from investment required to support the QCLNG project, even as it is set to be acquired by Royal Dutch Shell in a proposed $US70 billion ($98 billion) takeover and as returns from the venture are squeezed by low commodity prices.
As partners in QCLNG, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Tokyo Gas will fund part of the work, but the British company will shoulder most of the investment in line with its 73.75 per cent stake in the gas permits.